A “brand name”, or simply “brand”, identifies the brand owner as the commercial source of particular products or services. In some cases, words, logos, sounds, colors, and/or other source-identifying brand components may be registered with a government agency as trademarks, although registration is not required for a source-identifier to function as a brand or brand name.
In many cases, consumers are willing to pay a price premium for goods identified by highly-regarded brands. Consequently, some unscrupulous merchants are tempted to produce and/or sell fake replicas and/or imitations of brand-name goods to capture for themselves some of the price premium associated with highly-regarded brands. Such fake product replicas are commonly referred to as “knockoffs” or “counterfeit goods”.
Frequently counterfeited goods include brand-name clothing, handbags, shoes, pharmaceuticals, aviation and automobile parts, watches, electronics, software, works of art, toys, movies, and the like.
Counterfeiters typically attempt either to deceive a consumer into thinking that he or she is purchasing a legitimate product, or to convince the consumer that he or she could deceive others with a product that the consumer knows to be an imitation. A fake-replica item that makes no attempt to deceive, such as a copy of a DVD with missing cover art, is often called a “bootleg” or a “pirated copy”.
The sale of a counterfeit version of a particular brand-name good can harm the legitimate brand-owner in various ways. For example, a consumer who wants to buy a legitimate brand-name product may be diverted to purchase the knockoff because the knockoff might be priced lower than the legitimate product, depriving the legitimate brand-owner from the proceeds of that sale. Relatedly, knockoff products are often of lower quality than the legitimate versions of a brand-name product, so consumers who purchase a knockoff may develop lowered expectations about the quality of goods associated with the brand name, harming the brand-owner's goodwill in the brand.
To protect consumers and brand owners, the United States and most other developed countries prohibit the production, importation, and/or sale of counterfeit and other fake-replica goods under various trademark, false-advertising, and/or unfair-business-practice laws and/or doctrines. As a result, merchants that deal in counterfeit and other similarly prohibited goods typically do not make it easy for brand owners, enforcement authorities, or other interested parties to identify the merchants.
It is common for a given merchant that deals in counterfeit and other prohibited goods to set up multiple e-commerce websites or store front sites. However, it also common for a given merchant to establish only one or a small number of merchant accounts with one or a small number of payment service processors. In this context, the payment service processor is a company appointed by the merchant to handle credit card or other payment transactions for the sale of the merchant's (counterfeit) goods. It is common for a given merchant to use the same merchant account(s) with each of the store fronts that the merchant sets up.
It is often useful for a brand-owner or other interested party to identify the merchant accounts that are being used to process payments for sales of counterfeit or other prohibited goods. However, neither merchants nor payment service processors publicize such merchant-account identifiers.
In some, but not all, cases, it is possible to discover a merchant-account identifier by manually transacting with and inspecting a given store front. However, such manual inspection provides inconsistent results, is highly time-consuming, and does not scale well when there are hundreds or thousands of store fronts to inspect.